Either you are too young to remember a chap called Andy Kaufman, or you just never watched anything he did. He lived for this kind of satire; he had nearly the entire fan base of the WWF angry at him because they really thought he wrestled women and was Jerry Lawler's biggest nemesis. He even managed to fool his closest friends and family on occasion.
It's amazing to me that someone as transparent and silly as this Lyons fella could pull off such a Kaufman-esque practical joke. And as others here have noted, we slashdot nerds must be dumber than we look because most readers here and on FSJ's blog fell for it all the way.
I've heard jokes over the years how crappy Compaq's quality is, mostly since the merger with HP, but I've had a mostly good experience with them the few times I've bought a Compaq machine. My current laptop (and main computer) is a Presario V2000, and my only complaint thus far is that the TSST Corp. DVD burner is extremely picky about both the software that you burn with and the quality of the blank DVDs you use. Given that it is an interchangeable part, if I end up keeping this thing much longer I'll probably swap in a slot-loading burner soon.
Then again, I've been wanting to move away from a laptop as my main computer, mostly for the screen size and storage capacity, so I'm seriously considering an iMac. I definitely don't want Vista, and while a Mac Mini would probably meet my needs, I'd have to opt for the higher end one just to beat the specs of my year-old laptop in addition to buying a monitor. I'd be better off spending $200 more and getting an iMac which is fairly easy to upgrade.
Well said, all the way around. DRM is an issue that keeps me going back to GNU/Linux and BSD time and again. For a long time I thought I would be fine with running Windows and just buying non-protected mp3s from places like eMusic and now Amazon, and with ripping my own DVDs to my own external storage for the convenience factor. After Vista came out, and with all the restrictions in place for the foreseeable future, I'll be damned if I'm going to be locked into what Microsoft and the major content providers feel I should be limited to. If that means I won't buy any HD video content for a while, then so be it. DVDs still look good enough to me. If that means I'll have to be a bit more selective in future hardware purchases, well that's fine too.
Bottom line, DRM is meant to help the content and even hardware providers line their pockets at the expense of their customers. No thanks.
I don't know, something about "higher moral ground" or "don't stoop to their level" keeps going through my head when I read your post. Maybe it's just me though.
I'm pretty sure the laughing was due to the name of the engine and not the question of its efficiency or practicality. Personally I am a fan of rotary engine technology.
As long as we're comparing Firefly to anime, let's not forget about Cowboy Bebop. Cowboys in space with a "girl in a box" concept as well (Faye Valentine awakened from Cryo-Sleep) though I think the character of Edward is a closer parallel to the flawed-genius teenager of Firefly's River Tam.
How could a store ever be sure that all the electronic components in, say, the computers it sells are dispute-free?
They cannot, and hopefully that concept will be used by Best Buy and all the other defendants to obtain a summary judgment against these patent trolls. I mean come on, on Wi-LAN's own website they say up front and in your face "Our experienced management team is implementing a two-pronged strategy: to sign licenses with every company who uses our patented technology and to acquire new, valuable patents to further strengthen our portfolio." (emphasis mine). How much more blatantly trollish can you get?
I realize you were being funny, but your post made me wonder why anyone really would doubt that they were pack hunters. Wolves and other wild canines hunt in packs. A few species of big cats hunt in groups. Why wouldn't the small carnivores of sixty million years ago also hunt in packs?
Okay, fine. But this woman made NO money off of this, and she probably didn't even think about the fact that a RIAA artist's music was in the video. For that matter, the artist in question is Prince, who from what I've read recently is pretty ticked at the RIAA himself for how they treat their artists AND their customers.
I do understand your point about fair use but you seem to be arguing for argument's sake. Have you watched the video? You cannot even make out the song without turning the sound all the way up and really straining to hear it. Beyond that, you never addressed my other question. Why is a mother making a cute video of her kid being attacked when there are thousands of "real" infringers being left alone despite making custom music videos with high-quality, full length songs?
Bottom line, she made the video in innocence, and the record company is the one who blew it out of proportion.
Okay wait a damn minute. This video is less than thirty seconds long. I may be wrong but I thought it was considered fair use to use an excerpt from a song as long as said excerpt was less than forty-five seconds.
Then you have the thousands upon thousands of "Anime Music Videos" that use the entire song in a high-quality video production, that also happen to be a big draw to Youtube. Why aren't these videos being removed in droves? I wouldn't call those infringing myself, but if I did they would be a thousand times more infringing than a baby dancing to a near-unintelligible song playing on a crappy radio in the background.
Well actually I think you missed my point entirely. I wouldn't buy a program for very light web graphics use at all, be it Photoshop, PSP, PhotoPaint or whatever else is out there. To me, spending any money at all on a tool when I can get a free tool that is more than enough is quite silly. It's also quite silly to argue whether Photoshop or GIMP is the better editor, when they have completely different target audiences.
As for Paint.NET, I'm not sure where that comment came from. I didn't bring up that program because I don't use it. If you do, and it does the job for you, then that is great and I wish you luck with it!
Another excellent point. I'm a musician, not a visual artist, so regardless of whether it's GIMP or Photoshop on my computer, my results are limited by my own skill. And I suppose I never thought about it but you're probably right about most of these folks screaming about missing features that they would never use anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are a few professional artists and photographers on here who really can justify the expense and trouble of using Photoshop based on those advanced features. It's just that most of the whiners here are probably spoiled on Photoshop from using it in college or getting it from their favorite warez site, and they fear change. I used Photoshop in college before I ever heard of GIMP, and my first contact with GIMP was indeed awkward. I've learned to utilize it for my rare graphic needs though, as I cannot afford Photoshop and I refuse to obtain it illegally.
Re:Awesome new features!
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Despite your lame attempt at humor, you make a very good point. Photoshop is a tool, and a very versatile one at that, which is used by professionals to get the job done right. It's expensive and complicated, and for good reason.
The GIMP, on the other hand, is a comparatively simple tool, though still very useful and quite versatile in its own right. It is what us amateurs use because the pro tools are overkill and/or too expensive. It also happens to be free, in more than one sense of the word, which makes it ideal for its target audience. For example, I do web graphics sometimes. Why in the world would I spend close to US$500 for something that is rarely used and would be overkill to boot? I'd rather use my free image program with more tools in its toolkit than I would ever need for that task.
This is why I will never understand the PS vs. GIMP debate. GIMP will never be a Photoshop killer because there is no need for a Photoshop killer. Those who need the power of Photoshop will buy it (or steal it), those who don't will use GIMP or another simple tool.
The AMD Geode has a great GPU, but a significant web app (especially with lots of animation) will severely tax the CPU's horsepower.
I feel you on that one. My laptop has a 64-bit processor at 1600Mhz, a 3D video chipset and 1.25GB of RAM, and under Linux it's very sluggish on a media-rich page.
Actually, yes, because it is a lightweight PC. If you bother to read the article, you'll see that the company provides Windows drivers and you can indeed install Windows on it. The point of the device is not gaming though, it's light internet use or any of a dozen other things small-form-factor computers are good for.
And yes, I know you were trolling, but I can never resist feeding them these days.
Ah, but not everyone uses an iPod or even iPod-quality headphones. I personally use headphones with 20mm titanium diaphragms, and while they are consumer-grade (i.e. non-musician, non-audiophile), they are about the most accurate consumer-grade phones you can buy. The frequency response is 16-20,000Hz, which is both lower and higher than humans can actually hear, and they have a very high (again, for consumer-grade) signal-to-noise ratio. With these headphones I can definitely hear a difference between an mp3 and the original CD.
It gets really interesting, though, when I use these headphones to listen to a portable mp3 player. The portable players I've used (iPod Nano, Samsung Yepp) have a noticeable degradation of quality when playing mp3s compared to the same exact file played on my computer (Compaq laptop, ATI sound chip). Strangely enough, when I play mp3s on my Treo smartphone using the bundled RealPlayer software, they sound the same as on the computer. I wonder if processing power alone is an issue with portable players?
It's not even the tracking that bugs me so much, it's the resource-sapping flash ads. I went to Digg last night and there was this little flash thing that had a "cool" mouseover-trails effect that was all the rage back in 1999. The problem? It had some sort of memory leak, because Firefox slowed to a crawl and the system monitor showed close to 300MB RAM in use for the Firefox executable. When I was finally able to do so, I adblocked it and reloaded the page. No more memory leak, no more slow browser.
That, in essence, is the only time I use adblock. Static banners and even animated GIFs don't bother me, as long as they aren't trying to induce an epileptic seizure anyway. But, anything with sound that I can't turn off without clicking the fake mute button that registers as a clickthrough, and anything that slows my browser down or changes its dimensions, gets blocked. Just like with television, if the commercial annoys me I make a point of not buying the product. If the commercial is cool or at least sane, I might just look into it.
99% of users will click it away in fear of changing the "default" behaviour.
I'd love to visit the poll where you got that number. Oh? There is no poll, you just pulled it out of your head? It's nice to know that you can intuit what 99% of all computer users are thinking and doing.
It is unreasonable to expect users to know this value.
Not when it is explained right there on the setup screen, as I already stated. That being said, it may be unreasonable to expect a few users out there to be able to understand what it means by RAM usage and such, but I'd argue that those users would be better off using something simpler like Paint.
I understand what you're getting at, really I do. You want the program to have a default based on a percentage instead of a hard number. Well, not to sound like a parrot, but it's open source. You'd think that if your wants were commonplace among the users, someone out there would have submitted a code patch to address this very issue. Just because you think the world will benefit from something doesn't mean the world wants or needs it. I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of Gimp users either set the tile cache appropriately during setup or they find the setting later on and fix it then. If you're using Gimp, it's probably because you are aware of and accepting of open source software and therefore a bit above the average computer user's intelligence quotient.
Laziness is no excuse for making a program that appears, to new users, to perform much worse than it really does. Plus, I thought the whole point of this thread was that a good optimum setting (80% of available memory) is known, and the program merely stupidly defaults to a much smaller setting?
I don't think you've ever installed Gimp, or if you have then you blew right past the setup screens. One of the final screens you see during setup asks you if you want to change certain things including the hotly debated tile cache size. It even explains to you the trade-off between a larger cache with better speed vs. less RAM used and a slower speed. It doesn't "stupidly default" at all; it allows you, the user, to stupidly blow past the settings screens and if so, it sets some conservative defaults.
Most makers gave up building a special "California Car" ages ago and just make 1 clean model to keep mass market efficiencies.
This is probably true of American car companies; the repair manual to my 1996 SUV mentions that California models had two catalytic converters and four oxygen sensors instead of the one and two respectively that mine has. However, I wonder what the demographics are among imported cars? Do Honda, Toyota and Kia make all their American-bound cars to California regs or do they differentiate? If they don't, did they in the past?
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Either you are too young to remember a chap called Andy Kaufman, or you just never watched anything he did. He lived for this kind of satire; he had nearly the entire fan base of the WWF angry at him because they really thought he wrestled women and was Jerry Lawler's biggest nemesis. He even managed to fool his closest friends and family on occasion.
It's amazing to me that someone as transparent and silly as this Lyons fella could pull off such a Kaufman-esque practical joke. And as others here have noted, we slashdot nerds must be dumber than we look because most readers here and on FSJ's blog fell for it all the way.
I've heard jokes over the years how crappy Compaq's quality is, mostly since the merger with HP, but I've had a mostly good experience with them the few times I've bought a Compaq machine. My current laptop (and main computer) is a Presario V2000, and my only complaint thus far is that the TSST Corp. DVD burner is extremely picky about both the software that you burn with and the quality of the blank DVDs you use. Given that it is an interchangeable part, if I end up keeping this thing much longer I'll probably swap in a slot-loading burner soon.
Then again, I've been wanting to move away from a laptop as my main computer, mostly for the screen size and storage capacity, so I'm seriously considering an iMac. I definitely don't want Vista, and while a Mac Mini would probably meet my needs, I'd have to opt for the higher end one just to beat the specs of my year-old laptop in addition to buying a monitor. I'd be better off spending $200 more and getting an iMac which is fairly easy to upgrade.
Well just so you know, I wouldn't buy a damn thing from someone with www.vumit.com as their homepage on Slashdot. That's just sick, man.
Well said, all the way around. DRM is an issue that keeps me going back to GNU/Linux and BSD time and again. For a long time I thought I would be fine with running Windows and just buying non-protected mp3s from places like eMusic and now Amazon, and with ripping my own DVDs to my own external storage for the convenience factor. After Vista came out, and with all the restrictions in place for the foreseeable future, I'll be damned if I'm going to be locked into what Microsoft and the major content providers feel I should be limited to. If that means I won't buy any HD video content for a while, then so be it. DVDs still look good enough to me. If that means I'll have to be a bit more selective in future hardware purchases, well that's fine too.
Bottom line, DRM is meant to help the content and even hardware providers line their pockets at the expense of their customers. No thanks.
I don't know, something about "higher moral ground" or "don't stoop to their level" keeps going through my head when I read your post. Maybe it's just me though.
I'm pretty sure the laughing was due to the name of the engine and not the question of its efficiency or practicality. Personally I am a fan of rotary engine technology.
There's an app called "Bluejacker" for Palm based devices with bluetooth that will spam a message to any bluetooth-enabled devices within range.
Or in other words, it's orgy time!
Exactly. Mickey Mouse has been shopping at my local Kroger for quite some time now thanks to me.
As long as we're comparing Firefly to anime, let's not forget about Cowboy Bebop. Cowboys in space with a "girl in a box" concept as well (Faye Valentine awakened from Cryo-Sleep) though I think the character of Edward is a closer parallel to the flawed-genius teenager of Firefly's River Tam.
They cannot, and hopefully that concept will be used by Best Buy and all the other defendants to obtain a summary judgment against these patent trolls. I mean come on, on Wi-LAN's own website they say up front and in your face "Our experienced management team is implementing a two-pronged strategy: to sign licenses with every company who uses our patented technology and to acquire new, valuable patents to further strengthen our portfolio." (emphasis mine). How much more blatantly trollish can you get?
I realize you were being funny, but your post made me wonder why anyone really would doubt that they were pack hunters. Wolves and other wild canines hunt in packs. A few species of big cats hunt in groups. Why wouldn't the small carnivores of sixty million years ago also hunt in packs?
Okay, fine. But this woman made NO money off of this, and she probably didn't even think about the fact that a RIAA artist's music was in the video. For that matter, the artist in question is Prince, who from what I've read recently is pretty ticked at the RIAA himself for how they treat their artists AND their customers.
I do understand your point about fair use but you seem to be arguing for argument's sake. Have you watched the video? You cannot even make out the song without turning the sound all the way up and really straining to hear it. Beyond that, you never addressed my other question. Why is a mother making a cute video of her kid being attacked when there are thousands of "real" infringers being left alone despite making custom music videos with high-quality, full length songs?
Bottom line, she made the video in innocence, and the record company is the one who blew it out of proportion.
Okay wait a damn minute. This video is less than thirty seconds long. I may be wrong but I thought it was considered fair use to use an excerpt from a song as long as said excerpt was less than forty-five seconds.
Then you have the thousands upon thousands of "Anime Music Videos" that use the entire song in a high-quality video production, that also happen to be a big draw to Youtube. Why aren't these videos being removed in droves? I wouldn't call those infringing myself, but if I did they would be a thousand times more infringing than a baby dancing to a near-unintelligible song playing on a crappy radio in the background.
Well actually I think you missed my point entirely. I wouldn't buy a program for very light web graphics use at all, be it Photoshop, PSP, PhotoPaint or whatever else is out there. To me, spending any money at all on a tool when I can get a free tool that is more than enough is quite silly. It's also quite silly to argue whether Photoshop or GIMP is the better editor, when they have completely different target audiences.
As for Paint.NET, I'm not sure where that comment came from. I didn't bring up that program because I don't use it. If you do, and it does the job for you, then that is great and I wish you luck with it!
Another excellent point. I'm a musician, not a visual artist, so regardless of whether it's GIMP or Photoshop on my computer, my results are limited by my own skill. And I suppose I never thought about it but you're probably right about most of these folks screaming about missing features that they would never use anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are a few professional artists and photographers on here who really can justify the expense and trouble of using Photoshop based on those advanced features. It's just that most of the whiners here are probably spoiled on Photoshop from using it in college or getting it from their favorite warez site, and they fear change. I used Photoshop in college before I ever heard of GIMP, and my first contact with GIMP was indeed awkward. I've learned to utilize it for my rare graphic needs though, as I cannot afford Photoshop and I refuse to obtain it illegally.
Despite your lame attempt at humor, you make a very good point. Photoshop is a tool, and a very versatile one at that, which is used by professionals to get the job done right. It's expensive and complicated, and for good reason.
The GIMP, on the other hand, is a comparatively simple tool, though still very useful and quite versatile in its own right. It is what us amateurs use because the pro tools are overkill and/or too expensive. It also happens to be free, in more than one sense of the word, which makes it ideal for its target audience. For example, I do web graphics sometimes. Why in the world would I spend close to US$500 for something that is rarely used and would be overkill to boot? I'd rather use my free image program with more tools in its toolkit than I would ever need for that task.
This is why I will never understand the PS vs. GIMP debate. GIMP will never be a Photoshop killer because there is no need for a Photoshop killer. Those who need the power of Photoshop will buy it (or steal it), those who don't will use GIMP or another simple tool.
I feel you on that one. My laptop has a 64-bit processor at 1600Mhz, a 3D video chipset and 1.25GB of RAM, and under Linux it's very sluggish on a media-rich page.
Actually, yes, because it is a lightweight PC. If you bother to read the article, you'll see that the company provides Windows drivers and you can indeed install Windows on it. The point of the device is not gaming though, it's light internet use or any of a dozen other things small-form-factor computers are good for.
And yes, I know you were trolling, but I can never resist feeding them these days.
And wonderful pieces of flair.
Ah, but not everyone uses an iPod or even iPod-quality headphones. I personally use headphones with 20mm titanium diaphragms, and while they are consumer-grade (i.e. non-musician, non-audiophile), they are about the most accurate consumer-grade phones you can buy. The frequency response is 16-20,000Hz, which is both lower and higher than humans can actually hear, and they have a very high (again, for consumer-grade) signal-to-noise ratio. With these headphones I can definitely hear a difference between an mp3 and the original CD.
It gets really interesting, though, when I use these headphones to listen to a portable mp3 player. The portable players I've used (iPod Nano, Samsung Yepp) have a noticeable degradation of quality when playing mp3s compared to the same exact file played on my computer (Compaq laptop, ATI sound chip). Strangely enough, when I play mp3s on my Treo smartphone using the bundled RealPlayer software, they sound the same as on the computer. I wonder if processing power alone is an issue with portable players?
It's not even the tracking that bugs me so much, it's the resource-sapping flash ads. I went to Digg last night and there was this little flash thing that had a "cool" mouseover-trails effect that was all the rage back in 1999. The problem? It had some sort of memory leak, because Firefox slowed to a crawl and the system monitor showed close to 300MB RAM in use for the Firefox executable. When I was finally able to do so, I adblocked it and reloaded the page. No more memory leak, no more slow browser.
That, in essence, is the only time I use adblock. Static banners and even animated GIFs don't bother me, as long as they aren't trying to induce an epileptic seizure anyway. But, anything with sound that I can't turn off without clicking the fake mute button that registers as a clickthrough, and anything that slows my browser down or changes its dimensions, gets blocked. Just like with television, if the commercial annoys me I make a point of not buying the product. If the commercial is cool or at least sane, I might just look into it.
I don't think you've ever installed Gimp, or if you have then you blew right past the setup screens. One of the final screens you see during setup asks you if you want to change certain things including the hotly debated tile cache size. It even explains to you the trade-off between a larger cache with better speed vs. less RAM used and a slower speed. It doesn't "stupidly default" at all; it allows you, the user, to stupidly blow past the settings screens and if so, it sets some conservative defaults.
It was my understanding that this device was to use the same Palm-branded charger that the Treos and the Treo-branded bluetooth headsets share.